Product Description: This is the as-told-to political autobiography of Phüntso Wangye (Phünwang), one of the most important Tibetan revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. Phünwang began his activism in school, where he founded a secret Tibetan Communist Party...read more

Product Description: This is the as-told-to political autobiography of Phüntso Wangye (Phünwang), one of the most important Tibetan revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. Phünwang began his activism in school, where he founded a secret Tibetan Communist Party...read more

Product Description: The New Tibetan-English Dictionary of Modern Tibetan surpasses existing dictionaries in both scope and comprehensiveness. Containing more than 80,000 lexical items used in political, social, economic, literary, and scientific discourse, this invaluable sourcebook includes the tens of thousands of new words that have been coined or that have come into use since Tibet was incorporated into the People's Republic of China in 1951...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Tensions over the "Tibet Question"--the political status of Tibet--are escalating every day. The Dalai Lama has gained broad international sympathy in his appeals for autonomy from China, yet the Chinese government maintains a hard-line position against it...read more

Product Description: Following the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic of China gradually permitted the renewal of religious activity. Tibetans, whose traditional religious and cultural institutions had been decimated during the preceding two decades, took advantage of the decisions of 1978 to begin a Buddhist renewal that is one of the most extensive and dramatic examples of religious revitalization in contemporary China...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The liberalization of political and intellectual life in China and the rise of Tibetan exile communities throughout the world have produced a resurgence of spoken and written Tibetan. These developments, together with increasing contacts between Western scholars and Tibetans, have created a widening circle of English-speakers--in government, business, academia, and elsewhere--who need to speak or write Tibetan with precision and clarity...read more

Product Description: This beautifully illustrated book offers the first inside view of how the breakup of the Soviet bloc has affected this farthest republic and its nomadic peoples. The first Western scholars to be given permission to conduct fieldwork in Mongolia, Melvyn Goldstein and Cynthia Beall lived among a community of herders to study how they were adapting to Mongolia's transition to democracy and a market economy...read more

Product Description: "Half of the words are read by implication." This Tibetan saying explains the main difficulty Westerners face in learning to read Tibetan fluently. This book will allow beginners to understand the logic of Tibetan grammar and syntax through graded readings and narrative explanations...read more

Product Description: The "Tibetan Question," the nature of Tibet's political status vis-à-vis China, has been the subject of often bitterly competing views while the facts of the issue have not been fully accessible to interested observers. While one faction has argued that Tibet was, in the main, historically independent until it was conquered by the Chinese Communists in 1951 and incorporated into the new Chinese state, the other faction views Tibet as a traditional part of China that split away at the instigation of the British after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty and was later dutifully reunited with "New China" in 1951...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

For sixteen months between June 1986 and June 1988, Melvyn Goldstein and Cynthia Beall lived in Tibet studying a community of roughly three hundred Tibetan nomads at altitudes above 16,000 feet in yak-hair tents, weathering temperatures which reached thirty to forty degrees below zero, drinking butter-salt tea, and eating 'tsampa'...popped and ground barley ...and mutton. This copiously illustrated book is a fascinating account of these remarkable people, of their traditional way of life and their continuing struggle for cultural survival. In a world where indigenous peoples and their environments are vanishing at alarming rates, the survival of this way of life represents an unexpected and heartening victory for humanity. As the first Western scientists allowed to conduct in-depth research in Tibet in decades, Goldstein and Beall were given the opportunity to study first-hand and long-term the traditional lifestyles of the nomad's of Pala, a remote district on Tibet's western plateau known as the Changtang. The authors accompanied the nomads on their daily trips between the homebase encampment and the grazing grounds, on seasonal migrations to distant pastures and satellite camps, on yearly hay-cutting and salt-collecting events, and on hunting excursions that included the use of matchlock rifles and 'blue-sheep; dogs. The authors also participated in the milking, shearing, and butchering of the pastoralists' sheep and goats. The census and grazing-enclosure data the authors collected credit the nomads' traditional pastoral system with maintaining the sensitive ecological balance necessary to guarantee its perpetuation for countless centuries. Finally, the authors relate the radical changes wrought by the Cultural Revolution on the nomads' lives.